The wise people of Limerick have spotted Our Lady hiding in a tree! It was not until they was sawing the tree in half that they find her (I espect she was playing hide and seek with the cherubs), but now she will have to stay there while they worship her or until it rains or until the rugby come on and everyone go home.

Is the Splitting Image of Her!

There are some Septics and Doughty Thomases already who have come out of the woodworm to esclaim that it look nothing like her and that the people of Limerick must have been taking too many drugs again, but we have all had enough esperience in the Catholic Chruch of visitations and apparitions and possessions to know that you always need to squint when confronted with phenomenenena from the spiritual world. They are never look like what we espect them to. We have become so use to seeing Our Lady and Our Lord Jesus depict in the paintings of the Renaissance or in the Stations that we automatically assume that this is what they will look like in real life or in photographs. And yet we are always wrong!

After all, it make perfect sense, if Our Lady is going to appear in a tree, for her to have a slightly unshaven appearance and a wooden manner. I well remember when the Blessed Virgin was making an appearance in a floor drain in California and on that occasion some people was observing that she look like shit. Well of course she did! What are you espect?! A miracle? She was stuck down a drain for St. Peter’s sake!

Thus I think it is unfair to criticize Our Lady for the way she looks, the colour of her hair, the fact that she didn’t do herself up before going out, for her slatternliness and cetera. She was not especting company, after all. Why should she not be allow to go out in her dressing gown and pyjamas. You see that in Cabra all the time, and it is not usually virgins either.

I am notice that the local priest is making some strange noises about the apparition, esplaining that “You can’t worship a tree.” And he should know, of course.  But that is beside the point. Nobody is worshipping a tree. If they were, I doubt very much that they would chop it down.  It would be  strange form of worship.  And what is more, the priest is seeming to forget that Our Lady’s manifestation is a blessing for the people of Limerick, who will have a chance now to create some jobs, just like the people of Mayo did when Our Lady appeared at Knock Airport during a flying visit and they had to divert all the planes into the sea, like in that film (I have heard, by the way, that the people of Mayo are already call this apparition a fake, which is not only spiteful but also very unlike them.) With a recession that is hitting particularly hard the people of the West of Ireland, they could do with a chance to fleece some suckers, and all they need now is for some terminally ill child in a wheelchair to lick the stump and start tap dancing and they have a USP (is a marketing term which I think means Uninvited Sexual Proposition). Then they can go into overdrive, manufacturing miniature wheelchairs, Mass-producing small souvenir stumps, collecting holy water (rain that have dribbled down the stump), and flogging the twigs, leaves and branches off the rest of the tree (if there is any left! I espect already the pious people of Ireland have been down to the church and carted away the offcuts), not to mention splinters from the One True Stump. And when they are run out, they could always do a sideline in Mary Magdalene’s Bush.

The people of Limerick are not having much in life to look forward to, and here is an opportunity, thanks to Our Lady, to pick themselves up off their hind feet and pull one another off with their bootstraps. Is no surprise that some people were angry that the stump had been cover up with branches by unthinking tree surgeons. Not only was it a disrespect to Our Lady, who could not breathe, it was also bad for publicity.

You know, I think there could be a book in this, like one of Roddy Doyle’s escept funny. I shall start writing it this afternoon, when I have all the facts of the case at my disposal, and then I will discard them.

Someone get me Max Clifford!